Microsoft: We can recoup $7.5bn Bethesda purchase without putting games on PlayStation

By

Usama Jawad

Neowin
@@UsamaJawad96

·

Oct 17, 2020 01:24 EDT

with 5 comments

Microsoft made quite some waves in the gaming industry last month when it announced that it is acquiring ZeniMax Media for a staggering $7.5 billion. ZeniMax Media owns several high profile game development studios Bethesda Softworks, Bethesda Game Studios, id Software, ZeniMax Online Studios, Arkane, MachineGames, Tango Gameworks, Alpha Dog, and Roundhouse Studios. The purchase meant that all these studios are coming under the Redmond tech giant’s first-party umbrella, which led to questions about whether future games from them would also be launching on PlayStation platforms.

While Microsoft’s Phil Spencer stated that existing commitments such as Deathloop and Ghostwire: Tokyo’s timed PlayStation 5 exclusivity will be honored, he stated that for other games, the company will decide “on a case by case basis”. Now, the executive has shed some more light on this matter.

In an interview with Kotaku, Spencer clearly stated that Microsoft does not need to release Bethesda’s upcoming The Elder Scrolls VI on PlayStation platforms to recoup its $7.5 billion purchase. The executive then went on to say that:

I don’t want to be flip about that. This deal was not done to take games away from another player base like that. Nowhere in the documentation that we put together was: ‘How do we keep other players from playing these games?’ We want more people to be able to play games, not fewer people to be able to go play games. But I’ll also say in the model—I’m just answering directly the question that you had—when I think about where people are going to be playing and the number of devices that we had, and we have xCloud and PC and Game Pass and our console base, I don’t have to go ship those games on any other platform other than the platforms that we support in order to kind of make the deal work for us. Whatever that means.

While Spencer’s wording is vague enough to not be considered as a flat-out refusal of bringing upcoming ZeniMax games to PlayStation, it does indicate that Microsoft is under no such pressure. Clearly, with its success with Game Pass and xCloud, the company has a huge market of players to tap into.

All in all, it won’t be surprising if Microsoft decides not to release future ZeniMax Media games on PlayStation platforms. It might even be able to attract more gamers to its cloud streaming solutions if buying an Xbox console is out of the question for hardcore Sony fans. You can check out Spencer’s interview in its entirety by hitting the source link below.

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Source: https://www.neowin.net/news/microsoft-we-can-recoup-75bn-bethesda-purchase-without-putting-games-on-playstation

Phil Spencer, Bethesda Softworks, Xbox One, ZeniMax Media, The Elder Scrolls, Xbox Game Studios